Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment (Senator Birmingham) to a question without notice asked by Senator Waters today.

I asked about the state of the reef because, of course, over the weekend, the government handed in Australia's homework to the World Heritage Committee. People might remember—I certainly remember—that four years ago the reef narrowly avoided being listed as 'in danger'. Such a listing would have, of course, sent massive shock waves through the tourism industry. This government really had a strong warning then. Do you think they did anything about it in the intervening four years? Sadly, no. What we saw over the weekend was a glossy report that contained phrases like, 'We're actively managing the key pressures.' And rather than acknowledging what has been a drastic decline in the health of the reef it uses phrases like, 'There have been impacts on the overall universal value of the reef.' Those impacts are dire indeed. After those two bleachings in 2016 and 2017, 50 per cent of the coral cover of the reef died—it bleached and then it died, so it isn't coming back from that. Not only that, we then saw the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority do its standard assessment of the reef's health and downgrade its assessment of the long-term health of the reef from 'poor'—which is already an embarrassment—to 'very poor'. This is the government's own agency sending a damning assessment of the long-term health of the Great Barrier Reef. And what does this government do? It hands in its homework basically saying, 'Go back to sleep. Everything's fine.' And this is after our delegation, at that World Heritage Committee pre-meeting, had lobbied for climate change to not be a relevant consideration when thinking about whether sites should be on the endangered list. So I'm afraid this government has got an absolutely atrocious track record when it comes to addressing the health of the reef. I asked the minister this, and his response was: 'We made a record investment.' They privatised the management of the reef by giving almost half a billion dollars to a small charity that may well do good work but that certainly hadn't sought half a billion dollars of public funds to somehow manage the terrible state that the reef is in.

We've had subsequent Senate inquiries along those lines, and my colleague Senator Whish-Wilson has done some excellent work in uncovering the absolute dodginess and lack of transparency in that particular financial decision of government. But that doesn't deter this government—the privatisation of the reef and an absolute tone deafness to the climate science.

I then asked the minister: 'What about the IPCC report?'. That is the international regular climate report that says coral reefs are in real strife. We all know that the climate has already changed by one degree, but these scientists are saying if we hit 1½ degrees, we'll lose 90 per cent of coral reefs. And what's even more scary is that, if you hit two degrees of warming, you lose all coral reefs—100 per cent gone, nada. The livelihoods of 64,000 people who rely on the Great Barrier Reef remaining in the state that it is in, remaining moderately healthy, would be gone. That would be all of those jobs and one of the seven natural wonders of the world gone.

Rather than sit with the enormity of that scientific advice, this government instead does the 'la, la, la, la, we are meeting and beating our targets'. The science is saying your targets are too weak. Nobody accepts you are going to meet them but, even if you did, they are still too weak. They have us on track for at least three degrees of warming, when at two degrees we lose all coral reefs. When are you going to wake up? I ask why the reef homework didn't mention the millions of dollars in donations from big coal, big oil and big gas to this government and, frankly, to the Labor Party as well, because we think that's why we have non-existent climate policy and we think that's why the reef is in such a predicament—because this government is getting paid by the coal and fossil fuel industries to have terrible policies that trash the reef.

The President, who is in the chair at the minute, said there wasn't enough link between that issue and my question about the reef. If you can't understand the link between coal and climate change and the fact that it is cooking the reef then that is indeed a grave problem. So I maintain that the question was perfectly relevant; in fact, that is the whole point. This government cannot see that and it is an absolute travesty because we have the future of the largest living organism on the planet at stake. The scientists have been ringing the warning bells and alarm bells for years. There are 64,000 people who deserve to have their jobs protected. You don't hear this mob talking about their jobs or their livelihoods because they're too busy taking the money from big oil, big coal and big gas. We will keep advocating and working as hard as we can to protect what is left of the reef. But this government just keeps taking the money and the reef's future is at stake.

Question agreed to.